Programme
- Tristan and Isolde – Prelude and Liebestod
- The Poem of Ecstasy
- The Bells
Performers
- Olga Kulchynskasoprano
- David Butt Philiptenor
- Karina Canellakisconductor
About this concert
Conductor Karina Canellakis, renowned for delivering emotionally charged performances, takes on feats of musical storytelling in this narrative programme. Excerpts from Richard Wagner’s influential opera Tristan und Isolde capture two lovers at the beginning and end of their doomed love affair. Alexander Scriabin’s symphonic Poème de l’extase, or Poem of Ecstasy, is an immersive experience of delicately layered melodic motifs.
Sergei Rachmaninoff’s choral symphony The Bells, inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s poem of the same name, was one of the composer’s personal favourites. This monumental choral symphony recalls the ‘gladly chiming and mournfully tolling’ bells of Rachmaninoff ’s childhood, which filled his head as he wrote.